Probably No Black Holes, but Faster Internet

Posted by Joshua S. Hill

April 9, 2008

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is going to go online in June of this year, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. Doomsday predictions of universe eating black holes verge on the idiotic, but thanks to the new project, a successor to the failing internet may have been created.

Creating billions of collisions per second, the LHC will be creating a record amount of data by the minute. The internet was never going to be enough to capture the sheer amount of data transmitted from collider to storage. So CERN realized they needed something more.

CERN is amongst the dozens credited with “inventing/creating/fathering/etc the internet,” and is thus naturally one of those who should help rebuild it. With its original intent to be communication of research data between universities and the like, its metamorphosis in to a streaming video, music downloading, pornographic playground has created stresses not originally predicted.

In essence, instead of the hack-job of using old telephone cables, a hodgepodge of wires and whatever else came to hand to create our current internet, the new “grid network” has been created from scratch. Designed with dedicated fiber optic cables and 55,000 grid servers already installed – predicted to rise to 200,000 within the next two years – the new network is “the world’s largest international scientific Grid.”

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern.

“The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”

Most countries are currently struggling with rolling out ADSL 2+, WiMax or wireless internet. So that a new scientific network has already been instealled, with cables that run from CERN around the world, waves are definitely being made.

But it would be unlikely to see this turned over to the mass-populous, considering how well we’ve treated the one we’ve already got. Most likely, several years will be dedicated to seeing how well this new grid network manages the data transfers it was designed for, before it is turned in to what it wasn’t designed for.

Either way, for me, my next goal is seeing how I can get my hands on access to this research data.

Bookmark to: